Today -100: October 3, 1924: Every patriotic American has condemned the Ku Klux Klan but the president of the United States

All 47 League of Nations nations sign on to the compulsory arbitration protocol, or at least to recommend it to their home nations, and to the calling of an arms reduction conference.

China isn’t elected to one of the non-permanent seats on the League Council, so its delegates walk out. But hey, Uruguay got a seat.

William Butler, chair of the RNC, claims that in certain parts of the country the Democrats and La Follette Progressives are conspiring to deadlock the presidential election and throw it into the Congress, which he seems to think would result in Dem. running mate Charles Bryan becoming president (something about electing him vice president and then blocking a vote for president). He says he has evidence of this conspiracy but refuses to disclose it because reasons.

At Madison Square Garden, Dem. presidential candidate John W. Davis talks about the Republicans’ “alibi manufacturing industry,” such as former Sec. of the Interior Albert Fall’s claim that his $100,000 bribe was just a loan and former Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt Jr’s alibi that “he was nothing but a messenger boy” in the transfer of the Teapot Dome oil reserves to Interior. Davis takes a crack at the “Silent Cal” thing: Washington wasn’t silent, Lincoln wasn’t silent, “Roosevelt was not silent and the Lord knows Wilson was not silent.”

One of the speakers is Municipal Civil Service Commissioner Ferdinand Morton, not to be mistaken for Jelly Roll Morton. The first black man on the commission, Morton says black people consider the Republican Party faithless to them and are shifting to the Dems, regardless of what the D’s are doing in the South. “Every patriotic American has condemned the Ku Klux Klan but the president of the United States,” he points out.

Wyoming Gov. William Ross dies of complications of an appendectomy. The state doesn’t have lieutenant governors, so the secretary of state will take over until a special election, which will have an interesting result (no spoilers).

The French Academy bans the words “defeatism” and “defeatist.”

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